How to try out the new Android 2.3 – Gingerbread!

As Google just recently announced the Nexus S from Samsung, which is running the new Android 2.3, known as Gingerbread, I wanted to have a look at the new OS for myself.

Gingerbread comes with lots of new nice features and improvements, you can read about them here. Or you can watch the official video, to get a quick overview:

Altough testing the OS in an AVD, does not compare to the real device in terms of speed and awesomeness, It is the closest you can get right now.

Getting Android 2.3 up and running on your computer is an easy task, I previously created a very simple-to-follow tutorial how to get started with Android development. Installing Android 2.3 is much the same thing, so I assume you are coming from that guide, or already has a development environment set up.

If you dont have ADT or a development environment set up yet, you can follow the tutorial I wrote earlier.

Updating Eclipse ADT

To update our development tools, go to Help -> Check for updates in the Eclipse menu.

Select the Android DDMS and Development tools updates and click next, on the “review and confirm updates” page, click finish When it asks if you want to “restart now?” click yes. And that is it, ADT should now be up to date.